Solutions to Security and Privacy Issues in Mobile Social Networking Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, and Richard Han faaron.beach, mike.gartrell,
[email protected] University of Colorado at Boulder Abstract—Social network information is now being used in 1) We identify three classes of privacy and security prob- ways for which it may have not been originally intended. In lems associated with mobile social network systems: (1) particular, increased use of smartphones capable of running direct anonymity issues, (2) indirect or K-anonymity applications which access social network information enable applications to be aware of a user’s location and preferences. issues, and (3) eavesdropping, spoofing, replay, and However, current models for exchange of this information require wormhole attacks. While these problems have been users to compromise their privacy and security. We present examined before in other contexts, we discuss how these several of these privacy and security issues, along with our design problems present unique challenges in the context of and implementation of solutions for these issues. Our work allows mobile social network systems. We motivate the need location-based services to query local mobile devices for users’ social network information, without disclosing user identity or for solutions to these problems. compromising users’ privacy and security. We contend that it 2) We present a design for a system, called the identity is important that such solutions be accepted as mobile social server, that provides solutions for these security and networks continue to grow exponentially. privacy problems. The identity server adapts established privacy and security technologies to provide novel so- I.